by David Poyer
“Be damned if he isn’t,” said Wronowicz, regarding the little man with more favor. He put his big hand gently on the cabbie’s chest and took the wheel, but before he could straighten, the Neapolitan released it with both hands and began to crawl out the window, screaming. The man in the car ahead looked back, grinning, and screwed his finger into his cheek. Before any of them could react, their driver was in the street, running, and they saw him reach into his pants and flick out a knife. The car ahead sped up and turned, and they heard him scream a last malevolent blasphemy as he doubled into a side street after it. The taxi slowed, jolting as someone behind hit it, and after his first astonishment Wronowicz hauled himself over into the vacant seat, where he huddled with his knees up to his face.
“Where the hell did he go?”
“Down one of those alleys.”
“Well,” said Wronowicz, “I guess we got ourselves a taxi. Where you birds want to go? Anyplace in town, two thousand lire.” He winced as the gears ground, and clutched and threw it in again, his head cocked for the meshing; and then concentrated on the traffic, bending to peer out at the twisting streets, the churches, the pizzerias where sailors and marines sat, not together. The sky broke blue and strangely gay above the puce and pink apartments, new but shabby, the old women in black observing it all from their balconies like saints from a painted heaven. The stream of traffic came to a roundabout and he gunned the taxi rocking in tight circles around a crumbling fountain. The others cursed as, infected with the game, he cut suddenly across traffic toward an exit, scraping the fender of a Lancia. Wronowicz tossed his scraggy-bearded, wide-boned, madly blue-eyed face back and let out a shout of pleasure. His cap fell off and his thinning black hair sprang free. “Where to?” he roared again, the deep bass of his voice, the gaiety in it and release, filling the car; and the men behind him grinned, too.
“Let’s get something to eat first,” suggested Sullivan. “I’m going nuts for some linguine. That’s the only good thing about this goddamn country.”
“Wine,” Blood said.
“Well, that’s good too, yeah.”
“Place up here I been to … there it is,” said Wronowicz, slowing. “This look okay?”
“Sure.”
“I been here before, too.”
The three chiefs ordered and ate together with the complacence of old friends, though they had, in fact, not known each other long. Wronowicz was the longest aboard Ault, nearly three years; this was his second tour after picking up his anchors, which had come slow. Blood, the Mephistophelian quartermaster chief, had come aboard later, replacing a first-class who had displayed the poor judgment of smoking a bone while shooting evening stars one night.
Sullivan, the nearly bald boatswain, was brand-new this cruise. Things were not going well for him with the deck force. He was reputed not to be stern enough, unwilling or unable to kick ass the way a classic chief BM did; he looked in fact like someone’s henpecked dad. Wronowicz, glancing at him, saw his hands shake as he lit a cigar after the gelati. Kelly Wronowicz was not insensitive, but before some human situations he was at a loss. A fractured piston ring in a compressor, loss of vacuum in a main condenser—yeah. Those he could handle. A man who slacked off, who was inefficient or ignorant, that he could handle.
Problems like Sullivan had, though … he rubbed at his beard, and his mind moved on. He had drunk almost a liter of wine with the linguine. Perhaps because of that, or the three cups of joe, he felt unwontedly keen about this night’s liberty. Almost the way he had felt as a fireman deuce, so many years before it did not bear thinking about.
“How’s things down in the hole, Kelly?” said Blood, breaking into his thoughts.
“Like always. Runnin’ like a watch.”
“No trouble with that new ensign?”
“Callin? He just needs straightening out. We’re getting along,” said Wronowicz. “Say. What you men feel like doing tonight?”
“I got no plans,” said Sullivan mildly. “How about you?”
“Well,” said Wronowicz, “I’d kind of like to pick up one of those Naples brass beds. The old lady was on me for one a couple of years back.”
“Thought you were split up,” said Blood, waggling his beard.
“When Wronowicz promises something it gets delivered. You heard from, uh, Sarah?”
“A letter,” said Blood. “Oh. Picture of the new grand-kid.”
“Nice looking. Your first?” said Sullivan, examining the picture with genuine interest.
“Yep.”
“I’ve got three. Two by my daughter, one by my oldest boy. How about you, Kelly?”
“How about me, what?”
“You got any kids?”
Wronowicz said, after a pause, “One.”
“Oh, yeah? Got a picture?”
“Forget it, Sully,” said Chief Blood. Sullivan looked to him, then back to Wronowicz, who was examining the dregs in his glass.
“Sure,” he said. “Okay.” He closed his wallet and put it away.
“How about we pick up the bed, then go to a place I know,” said Blood, shoving his chair back. “You drink Jack Daniels, don’t you, Kelly? And there’s girls upstairs.”
“That sounds good, Unc.”
“Girls?” said Sullivan, looking from one of them to the other.
“Girls, yeah. You’re a grandfather, you ought to know what split-tails are for.”
“This may sound kind of funny to you boys,” said Sullivan, “but this is my first time deployed. I came up through tugboats on the West Coast, San Diego. Aren’t you afraid of … well, you get things from prostitutes, don’t you?”
They stared at him. “You can, sure,” said Blood.
“Well … what if you do? You don’t want to take that home.”
“Look,” said Wronowicz, his voice rising a little, as it did when he explained to one of his firemen how to tear down a pump. “You ever heard of PCOD?”
“Pea-cod?”
“West Coast sailors … that’s Pussy Cut-Off Date. At the beginning of a cruise you figure it takes forty days to cure you if you get the old, uh, scabulosis, or anything. Right? So you subtract that from the date you make home port. Add ten days for the symptoms to show; and that’s PCOD. No screwing around after that. That way you’re okay when you pull in to Pier Six and the old lady’s there waving the flag for you.”
“It sounds pretty cold-blooded to me,” said Sullivan.
“You asked us, didn’t you?” said Blood. “Say, what’s the longest you was out, on those tugs?”
“Two weeks, to Hawaii.”
“Try holding it for six months and then tell me about it.”
* * *
By the time they finished dinner it was dusk. The taxi stood where they had left it. “Pile in,” said Wronowicz. “Let’s head up back in some of these alleys, see if there’s any brass for sale.”
“Good beds, huh?” said Sullivan. “They make ’em here?”
“Cast them right here in the city. Anybody hit you up for scrap yet? Any of the locals?”
“There was a guy on the pier wanted to talk about it. I told him to come back tomorrow.”
“He’s after brass. Shell cases, belaying pins from the signal bridge, turnbuckles off the lifelines, pipe fittings, anything. You got to watch them close if you let ’em aboard. One of ’em got the commissioning plaque off the Belknap, bolts and all. Okay, here we go.”
The roads narrowed once they turned uphill, became cobbled streets dank with sewers, shops lit yellow in the falling darkness. Sausages and netted cheeses hung above mounds of grapes. Wizened men in suits raised glasses in a trattoria; women in shawls clustered around the door of a tiny church. The taxi snaked between walkers, dodged bicyclists; the way was too narrow for two cars abreast. At a corner a bersaglieri’s head swung to follow them; Wronowicz stepped on the gas for several random turns. “Family neighborhood,” said Blood after a time, from the rear seat. “You sure this is right?”
“It sure as shit is,” said Wronowicz triumphantly. The taxi pulled to the curb, and the three of them piled out, clumsy from the wine and heavy food.
Alone in the dark windows, lit from far back in the building, three naked bedsteads gleamed copper-golden. They were identical, posts lathed into intricate knobs, the frames polished brass, or maybe only gilded. The light was too dim to tell, and the glass they peered through was cloudy with dust.
“Is it open?”
“Try the door.”
“Locked.”
“Closed.”
“Too bad, Kelly. Have to come back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, hell. I plan to be hung over and fucked out tomorrow. I couldn’t even find this place again.” He peered into the building for a moment more, then raised one immense hand and hammered at the door till glass rattled. “Hey! Anybody in there?”
“Jesus, take it easy,” said Sullivan, looking back at the street. Several passersby had stopped to watch.
“Che cosè?”
“Who said that?”
“Up there. At the window.”
They backed off and looked up. A woman was looking down at them. “We want the beds,” Wronowicz called up. “Can we see them?”
“Come?”
“The beds! Beds!”
People laughed behind them. The woman frowned down at them for a moment more, then the window banged shut. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” said Blood.
“I told you, Wronowicz always delivers.”
“Yeah, and I’ve heard ducks fartin’ in the water before, too,” said Blood; but he was smiling when the machinist’s mate looked at him.
A light came on then, back in the store. A moment later the door jingled open, jarred on a chain, and without warning or premonition Kelly Wronowicz found himself looking into the most intense, most intimately wise eyes that he had faced in the peregrinations and permutations of forty-five years.
“Sì,” she said, looking at him, not at the others. He felt the wine reel in his head, only it was not the wine, and he reached a big hand to the window for support. It bent ever so slightly against his weight, readying itself to shatter.
“Kelly, you all right?” said Chief Sullivan, behind him.
He moved his hand to the frame, and looked away from her upturned face. It was an effort but he did it. “Yeah … hi. You mind the store? I mean, you work here?”
She nodded, her eyes darker than the dresses of the old women, deep as the strip of night above the unlighted street. He saw now, in the alternate scarlet and darkness from the taxi’s flashers, that she was younger than he, but not by much. But the chin was firm as youth, the dark hair carefully wound, the housecoat held at the waist clean, and the swelling of bosom above that and the shadow below more than sufficient to bring the months at sea up thick in his belly. But it was more than that too, more than that.
For just a moment Chief Kelly Wronowicz, at home in a world of metal and men, felt afraid.
He pointed through the crack in the door, toward the beds, and she stared for a fraction of a moment; and then understood, nodded, and slid the chain free. The women outside tittered. She flipped a hand and spat a couple of words at them as the three chiefs filed inside. “Nice,” said Blood, eyeing Wronowicz lewdly; and he did not mean the beds.
Conscious of her body close behind him, the big machinist ran his hands over the furniture. “Damn,” he said.
“What’s wrong, Kelly?”
“These look nice, but … listen.” He rattled the frame, and the whole bed shook and squeaked. “Feels like they’re made of sheet metal. No way this’ll hold two people.”
“It might, if they didn’t move around much.” Blood smirked.
“Shut up. She might understand English.”
“She’s old enough to know what beds are for, Kelly.”
“Well, these are too flimsy.” He turned to her, pitching his voice rough because of the other men, but when he met her eyes again, the silent understanding of her lips, he heard himself say shyly, “Uh … these all the beds you got, ma’am?”
She stared up at him. In the dim light from the back of the store he could see the individual strands of hair, each one incredibly fragile, but together dense as ebony. A strand curled along her neck, into the robe, and he could see where the fullness began, the breastbone etched by shadow. Seeing him wait, she smiled hesitantly and held up eight fingers.
“No. Not price. More beds?” He rejected the three in the window, pushing his hand away, then waved toward the back of the store. “Better beds. Strong. See?” He bared his arm, gripped his muscle, shook it. She furrowed her brow, looking at the tattoo, and then at him; then understood. Her face came alight again, and she motioned him to the back.
“Hey! Get away from that car!” Sullivan shouted, at the door.
“Trouble, Chief?”
“Kids. Tell you what, you go do your shopping, we’ll stay out here and watch it.”
“Yeah,” said Blood, his beard elaborately innocent of guile or entendre. “You just come on out when you’re finished.”
Wronowicz looked after him. There were times when he liked Blood, and other times when he wanted to deck him. But then he heard her call something in liquid syllables from the dimness of the store, where piled furniture loomed in shadow like the monsters in the basement when you were a child. Light, yellow as Galliano, poured from a hidden bulb around her motionless figure, waiting for him, the housecoat draped opaque over firmnesses and softnesses already tangible in the anticipation of his trembling hands.
He forgot the others as he followed her up a flight of narrow stairs, the wear of years concave in the wooden steps; and looking up at her back as he climbed he could smell her, and the place itself: old wood, polish, obscure redolences of old perfumes, the deep ineradicable fragrance of olive oil seeped into walls for so many generations it is part of the wood. They reached the landing, where a huge old wardrobe stood, and she led him down a corridor and opened a door to him and gestured him in, standing aside.
“Yeah, this is what I wanted,” breathed Wronowicz.
The bed was enormous. It was larger than a double, maybe a king-size, and it was old. The frame—it was real tin-rich brass; he could tell that even under decades of oxidation, careless coats of age-darkened varnish—was massive. Trying to shake it was like trying to shove the ship away from the pier with your hands. It dominated the room, and it was not until he stepped back, dusting his hands, that he saw the rest of it; the lofty, blackened ceiling; old plaster, flaked and spotted by water and years; an oak bureau, a washstand, for God’s sake, with the same basin and pitcher he remembered dimly from his own grandmother’s room, so long ago it hardly seemed like himself remembering it. He leaned to inspect a photograph. A woman holding flowers, a man seated before her with his hat on his knee; young in the tintype forever, but the high-collared dress, the buttoned shoes meant they, too, had joined the irrevocable past. Her parents? Grandparents, more likely. Had this been their bed?
He turned, to find her watching him silently, the light behind her from the hallway. He saw now that the housecoat was worn thin, that the darkness in her eyes was allied with worry. Alone? Yes. She was alone. And she needed money.
“How much?” he said, indicating the bed, hearing the eagerness and shame in his voice.
“One … one hund’ dollari?” she whispered.
Too much, he told himself at once. And then thought, no, it’s cheap. For a piece of scrapcast junk it was too much, but this was real. What would an antique like this be worth in the States? And, damn, she looked like she needed it.
“Okay,” he grunted, and saw her face brighten, then fall as she looked at the bed; and then she lifted her head and smiled. He flipped out his wallet and went through the twenties. She took money like a child accepting candy, cupping her hands, and when he had given her all of it she counted it and thrust it into her robe and then, all at once, became businesslike. She stripped the bed, rollin
g the mattress off, and he held the headboard while she broke the rails free. “Let me do that,” he said, but she ignored him. They stacked the headboard and baseboard in the corridor, and she closed the door.
For a moment they stood there, in the silence of the house. Then he took her by the shoulders. She looked up, and after a moment he found himself trembling, unable to move or even think before the vastness of her understanding, her certitude, her peace. And then her eyes closed, and he felt her yield to him without a word, without a motion, and her arms came up to hold him, too.
* * *
“Kelly! Kelly!”
He came back, feeling her move slightly in his arms, her breath sighing in his beard. He lifted his head from her hair and heard the voices in the street, the seesaw of a siren—
“Jesus,” he whispered, and she caught her breath as he released her. He looked down at her, at her tremulous smile; and knew in that long moment that he would retain this the rest of his life, would yearn for this as long as he remembered. He would remember the room, the bed, the smells of olive and lavender; would live forever with the woman who looked up at him unsmiling, grave, and waiting. He had found this twice before in his life. Once, he had lost her, and once, he had married her; and both times it had not been her.
But now it was, and he was old enough to know that this was the last time.
And then the voices came again from below, calling him, and he reached for his cap as the banging began on the door.
He reached the stairway as Sullivan and Blood came running up it. “Hey. What’s goin’ on?”
“You done yet, damn it? We got cops up the ass out there.”
“Cops?”
“They think we stole the taxi,” Sullivan explained. His bald head was slicked with sudden sweat. “Is there another way out of here? We got the door locked but—”
The crash of glass from below finished his sentence. Wronowicz looked along the hallway. The balcony at the end … “Let’s try out there,” he said, pointing. “Hey! Wait a second!”
“What, Kelly?” said Blood, turning, the slender double doors already partly open. “There’s a roof down here. I think we can make it.”
